Coverage
LiteNet has no local access numbers, no POP list and no roaming agreement. It has three ordinary US telephone numbers, all landing on the same answering pool. The number you dial decides which modem engine picks up, and that decides your speed. If your telephone can dial the United States, you are covered.
Pennsylvania
Rate centre PHPHSBZN25, Pennsylvania — a Philadelphia-area rate centre in the 610 area code. This is the original dial-in number and the one with proven media: a real telephone call to it reached Asterisk, was answered, and produced 661 RTP packets for 660 frames with zero loss.
Carrier answering V.22bis at 2,400 bps In service since 1994
Boston
Rate centre HYDE PARK, Massachusetts. The seven digits spell 857-DIALUPS, which is the whole reason it exists: it says what the service is in a word an ordinary person decodes without being told.
V.32bis, 4,800 to 14,400 bps Needs a V.32bis modem No PSTN call yet
This is the fast number, and it is the only one that is fast. The engine behind it does V.32bis and nothing slower: a modem that can only do 2,400 does not train on it, measured at zero connections out of ten attempts. Dial it if you know your modem does V.32bis. It has carried a synthetic call end to end through the dialplan at 14,400 — and it has never carried one from the public telephone network, which is why the Pennsylvania number is still the one to try first.
Texas
Area code 940, Texas. The seven digits spell 940-LITENET. It is the newest of the three, wired into the dialplan and answered by the same engine that answers Pennsylvania.
V.22bis at 2,400 bps 940-LITENET No PSTN call yet
| Number | Rate centre | Area code in service | Spells | Proven |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| +1 610 922 1996 | PHPHSBZN25, Pennsylvania | January 1994 | — | Yes — clean audio on a live call |
| +1 857 342 5877 | Hyde Park, Massachusetts | May 2001 | 857-DIALUPS | Not yet — ordered, routed, in the dialplan |
| +1 940 548 3638 | Texas | May 1997 | 940-LITENET | Not yet — routed, in the dialplan |
All three numbers are matched by the same dialplan handler and admitted at the same point, so there is exactly one call path to reason about rather than three. Your account works on any of them. What differs is the modem engine that answers, and therefore the speed.
Plainly: whatever your own telephone carrier charges for a call to a Pennsylvania, Massachusetts or Texas number. LiteNet charges nothing for the call, receives nothing from it, and has no way of seeing what you were billed.
All three are standard geographic US numbers. None is toll-free — calling them is not free to you. None is a premium-rate or shared-cost number — nobody is being billed extra and no revenue comes back to LiteNet. They are the same kind of number as a shop or a neighbour.
On most modern US plans a domestic call is included in the bundle and costs nothing extra. On a metered line, a legacy long-distance plan, a prepaid mobile or an international call, it costs whatever your provider's rate is. Check your own tariff before you leave a modem connected for three hours.
Anywhere that can dial a US number can reach LiteNet — dial +1 and the ten digits, with whatever international prefix your country uses. There is no geographic restriction, no allowlist and no registration of your calling number. A modem in Osaka gets the same carrier a modem in Reading does.
An ATA works, with a caveat that has nothing to do with LiteNet: modem tones survive uncompressed G.711 and are destroyed by the compressed codecs most VoIP providers prefer. If your adapter can be pinned to G.711 with echo cancellation and any “voice enhancement” turned off, a call will usually train. If it cannot, the modems will handshake and fail, repeatedly, and no amount of retrying will fix it.
Thirty-two connection slots exist. Twenty-four is what this host will actually carry at the same time, and that number is measured rather than guessed: zero late frames at sixteen calls and at twenty-four, 426 late frames at thirty-one, and collapse at thirty-eight.
24
Concurrent callers, across all three numbers combined
25th
The call that gets a busy signal, exactly as it would have in 1996
1
Public IP address everyone shares, in Ashburn, Virginia
Twenty-four is a hard ceiling, and it is the lower of two. The carrier
will now deliver up to thirty-two calls; the answering pool refuses the
twenty-fifth, because twenty-four is the largest number this machine was
measured to carry without a modem missing its twenty-millisecond deadline.
Refusing a call is better than degrading everyone already on one.
All three numbers draw from the same twenty-four, so eleven people on one
number leaves thirteen for the other two. Trying a different number when
the pool is full will not help — that is the one thing worth knowing, and
it is the opposite of how it used to work. There is no queue and no
callback: a busy line is busy, and the honest answer is to try again in a
few minutes.
You need an account first — it takes one email and it is free.